Saturday, January 5, 2013

Lawyers
for accused leaders of the Philadelphia mob railed against prosecutors
and their case Friday, urging jurors to acquit the men and reject an FBI
probe they said took more than a decade because it was built on petty
crimes, flimsy evidence, and unreliable witnesses.
"They were
investigating for 13 years," attorney Gregory Pagano told jurors. "They
were waiting for something bigger and better than video poker machines
and sports betting to come along - and it never did."
A day after
a prosecutor spent more than three hours delivering his closing
argument, Friday was reserved for defense lawyers to fire back.

They did, again and again, for five hours.
Prosecutors lied or twisted evidence, they asserted. There had been no
proof of racketeering, they said. Agents tried to entrap suspects, they
contended, and scripted or pressed informants to get what the government
wanted or needed for a case.
In the first of five hour-long
summations, lawyer Christopher Warren reminded jurors that one
wire-wearing turncoat killed himself after becoming an informant, while
another threatened to do so.
"Their cooperating witnesses either
wanted to kill themselves or do kill themselves, and [agents] lie to
people about death threats to get them to cooperate," said Warren,
representing reputed captain Joseph "Scoops" Licata.
Jurors will
hear the last defense argument Monday from Edwin Jacobs Jr., lawyer for
alleged boss Joseph "Uncle Joe" Ligambi, followed by the government's
rebuttal argument. Deliberations could start Tuesday, U.S. District
Judge Eduardo Robreno said.
Prosecutors say the Ligambi, 73, and
his associates used the mob's reputation for intimidation and violence
to control illegal gambling, loan-sharking, and bookmaking operations
across the region for a decade.
The defense didn't deny that the
mob exists, that their clients are associates, or that they may have
committed, as Gary Battaglini's lawyer, Lawrence O'Connor, said,
"isolated incidents of marginally criminal activity, acting on their own
behalf."
They took pains to attack the individual crimes alleged
in the 51-count indictment, but at times argued on behalf of all the
defendants, each charged with an overarching racketeering conspiracy.
"This case is full of reasonable doubt," said Margaret Grasso, lawyer
for alleged soldier Damion "Dame" Canalichio. "Incredible witnesses -
not just lying in the past, but lying" during the trial.

She and others scoffed at the star prosecution witnesses: "degenerate"
gamblers or self-admitted criminals like Louis "Bent Finger Lou"
Monacello who cut deals to get out or stay out of prison.
"That's
their evidence in this case - it's Louis Monacello against my client,"
said Paul Hetznecker, lawyer for reputed consigliere George Borgesi, who
prosecutors say kept running his bookmaking operations while spending
most of the decade in a West Virginia prison. "Monacello is a convicted
perjurer who wants to get out of jail," Hetznecker said.

Pagano, the lawyer for reputed captain Anthony "Ant" Staino, said his
client was under surveillance for more than two years, shadowed by
undercover agents and named in thousands of recorded conversations.
Still, there wasn't "a shred of evidence" that money flowed between
Staino and the others, nor that any of them employed the brutality long
associated with the mob, he argued.
"If Mr. Staino was inclined
to act violently, he had plenty of opportunity to do so," Pagano said.
"If any of these seven men was inclined to act violently, they had the
opportunity to do so."
Warren said Assistant U.S. Attorney John
S. Han "flat-out made up" facts during his closing argument. He said a
secretly recorded 2010 gathering in a North Jersey restaurant that the
prosecution says was a critical meeting of mob bosses from Philadelphia
and New York was really "a bunch of geriatric old gangsters waxing
nostalgic" about past times.
Prosecutors, he said, "spent more time talking about what the Mafia used to be instead of what it is now."
What the case showed, he said, was not a smoothly operating
hierarchical enterprise with crime as its means and ends - as the
racketeering statute requires. More likely, he said, it was a collection
of individual operators trying to get by.
Including his client,
Licata, a 71-year-old who Warren said runs a used-car lot in New Jersey
and has spent much of the last two decades in prison.
"It is a 'broke, broke' mob," Warren said.
The argument won praise in corners of the courtroom, from relatives and
supporters of the defendants who had grumbled during Han's summation a
day earlier.
"Hey, nice job," one told Warren as they passed during a break. "You ate his brains."